The top end of H1B has been great for America. In the last few decades, there has been growth of abuse of the program to get mid level talent at below market rates which really hurts the middle class in America. People need to understand that most reformists don't want to get rid of the truly exceptional immigration to the US. We need to limit the volume, especially the immigrants that are directly competing with a hollowed out middle class in the US. Let me know if you want further reading on this topic.
The hollowing out of the middle class in the US isn't because of immigrants, it's because of a sustained campaign by capital to reduce the power of labor over the last 50-odd years and to concentrate wealth as best they can. Immigrant labor contributes to that because we've got inadequate labor protections and because we bought into the idea that lower consumer prices was a fine reason to ignore both labor and antitrust.
"The hollowing out of the middle class in the US isn't because of immigrants, it's because of a sustained campaign by capital to reduce the power of labor over the last 50-odd years and to concentrate wealth as best they can."
Creating low cost alternatives and taking advance of lax laws is part of that. If you can import 100k skilled workers per year under a scheme that gives you more power over them. Then you also offshore 300k jobs per year to countries with weaker protections.
It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.
Wholeheartedly agreed. I used to work very closely with economists in asset management. What looks like efficiency on a spreadsheet can look very different on the ground.
> The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.
A valid critique of how globalism was implemented in the US. However, this concern could be heavily ameliorated by policy. For example, making US companies using foreign labor adhere to the same labor standards they must adhere to domestically.
Perhaps a reason you’re baffled is because you are thinking only of domestic labor instead of global labor. Most Pro-labor people would, I imagine, consider the global labor pool in their analysis.
> Most Pro-labor people would, I imagine, consider the global labor pool in their analysis.
This is an insanely modern take on "pro-labor" movements, especially in the US. Traditionally, pro-labor has been 100% focused on local labor. If you told your average union member that being "pro-labor" meant closing their factories and offshoring their jobs they'd laugh (or more likely, spit) in your face.
I was referring more to Marxist / classic Socialism. Those movements. I agree that contemporary labor unions in the US are largely not adherents to the communist “workers of the world” ideology.
> making US companies using foreign labor adhere to the same labor standards they must adhere to domestically.
There are already rules in place but no real enforcement. Large software companies save a fortune making workers compete with workers from countries that have dramatically lower cost of living, entirely circumventing the market constraints that favor workers.
In hiring the people the H1B was designed for, 100k is nothing.
> Most Pro-labor people would, I imagine, consider the global labor pool in their analysis.
This is a disingenuous argument. Allowing companies to pocket a huge amount of money that would have gone to the people they laid off to hire H1Bs with common skill sets is not pro labor by any measure.
Yeah that would be great, but the legal and logistical barriers stopped that from happening for the past few decades won't likely change any time soon.
it shocks me seeing how people are blind to the whole offshoring thing - I'm dev from 'third' world country (in Europe) and when joined my team had 9 people out of 13 from USA. In 4 years, we are down to ONE person, and this one is on H1B visa.
It would be as great if European and others countries put a 25% tax on all revenue Google, Facebook etc. generate in their countries.
Especially tech companies making their money from ads and such provide very little real value and just drain massive amounts of money and transfer it to the US economy.
They generally have way more employees in the US relative to how much money they are making domestically.
Your comment did not deserve to be downvoted, I don't know who did it or why they did it without some kind of comment explaining their bone of contention.
I like your focus on middle class. That is if we're viewing h1b as an input we ought to eval based on what's good for the middle class.
I don't quite agree that much with causes: high housing, Healthcare & med bankruptcy, and high education costs (correlating with high housing) are bigger factors. However non tech/lawyer/doctors have been adversely effected by the fact they've seen no real income gains in 25 years overall.
Now, the top 5% and corps need to be made to pay more taxes... thats another subject.
A couple elderly people i know are quite concerned Trump will take their snap benefits, or decrease medicaid/care etc while the tax reductions were given on the bb bill. Thats not acceptable.
> However non tech/lawyer/doctors have been adversely effected by the fact they've seen no real income gains in 25 years overall.
We may be reaching the breaking point where Americans view any solution to this problem as worth trying. We’re near 2 generations of flat real income for the vast majority of Americans. When your grandparents are the last generation to remember rising living standards, it’s hard to buy that the system is working for you at all.
> We’re near 2 generations of flat real income for the vast majority of Americans.
No, we aren't! We have statistics on this (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). Median real income is up substantially since 40-50 years ago, depending on what you count as a generation. And we have stories and records of what life was like in the 1970s, when 80% of households had to hand wash dishes and 50% had to line-dry clothes. The reason people believe living standards haven't risen since their grandparents' day is that they get false nostalgia bait depictions of how a typical person lived in their grandparents' day.
(What is true, and what I'm sure contributes to the power of the nostalgia bait, is that real income stagnated with the dot-com bubble and didn't hit a sustained rise again until the mid-late 2010s.)
Real people don't care about "real income". They care about if they can get and retain a decent home, job and life. How much debt they are in, that their education is enough, how their social life is, if they can have kids and how they think about their future.
"Real income" is measured against the consumer price index (CPI). CPI is used to gauge inflation, "are people paying more for groceries this year than last?", not living standard. Most of the important questions like "how many years of education do you need for a good job?" or "how many average salaries do you need for a good home?" are all massively worse. So are many metrics of despair.
What real income really shows is that more money now gives you less. That what buys you a loaf of bread doesn't buy you a good life anymore. Because median income might be keeping up with inflation, but not with anything else.
You can’t use cpi directly like that. The model uses hedonic adjustment to say that modern goods are better than old stuff so you are earning more.
For example your $1000 oled tv is better than your $1000 crt tv therefore you your purchasing power has gone up. Or your base truck now comes with nav therefore your truck can be 5k more and still be net neutral.
The problem with this system is that in order to stay in the same price catagory on the index you continually need to move down the product tiers. So today’s lowest tier is a decade ago mid tier is 2 decades ago high end. Moving down like that makes you feel poorer because wealth is relative.
Even this is missing the point. While they try to distract us with the price vs quality of tvs, the cost of college and housing has skyrocketed.
60 year ago, a 20 year old guy with a high school education could support a wife and 2 kids. Today he needs his wife to work and has to wait until 30 just to buy a 1 bedroom apartment. Forget about kids. But they act like we are kings because now we have iphones.
TVs are the archetype of of why hedonic adjustment is necessary. Your $1000 OLED TV is better than your $1000 CRT TV, but it's not even the right comparison. Every TV on the market today, even the bargain basement ones it never even crossed your mind to buy, is better than your $1000 CRT TV. We've hedonically adjusted, so it's hard to believe - is it really true that the "huge" "high definition" CRTs our cool friends had two decades ago were 720p and <35 inches? But yes, it is true.
I never had a CRT die on me. A $100 Best Buy TV is disposable junk. Is that factored in to your index? Modern product lifespan is at least half, and repairing something is no longer an option or is 'replace $1000 board' not the $50 fix it used to be. The current price should be at least doubled to try and match in some way. For 30 years my parents had the same TV, is that factored in? My TV has an explicit shelf life. Apps have already stopped working/being supported even without the TV breaking.
My parent's TV never sold any data. My new, much more 'expensive' TV spys on me 24X7. You would not have been able to PAY my grandparents enough to put a TV like that in their house, yet alone consider it an 'upgrade'.
As the sibling also mentions, you need to add in ongoing costs, or expected yearly ecpensiture on TVs, which makes even the worst modern TVs much more expensive that older crts.
You need to do this with all tech.
But factoring in hedonic adaptation is fine, if general societal trends are also factored in.
30 years ago there was strong social institutions on workplaces that people have to buy into now. More people did manual labor where they need to pay for fitness now.
Your CRT TV didn't try to manipulate you into spending on stuff you don't need. Your average OLED today does (if you give it an internet connection for now, but you need that for some of the features that supposedly make it better).
It may have improved on paper but the quality of the experience has not.
The real issue is that housing is heavily underweighted in the cpi basket. How many people do you know that are only spending 12.9% of their after tax take home on housing, water and fuel? Only people with paid off mortgages.
Yet people feel like their purchasing power is going down.
Their expectations might be to live in the top few decile neighborhoods of a metro, where land prices have gone up a few hundred thousand in the previous decade.
It doesn’t matter if the stats say income went up 10% if they or their kids won’t be able to land that house they wanted, or can’t make that appointment with the doctor and instead have to see an NP, or worry about having to move to a more expensive metro to reduce income volatility.
This is pretty spot on. In the mid/latter half of the 20th century, most people who thought they should have what they thought was the good life could get it. It's less about "you didn't need 2 incomes" and more about "culturally, people thought women should work in the home while men worked outside it".
Now, it's not really even clear what the good life is, but whatever you think, it's very hard to get it. Schools, commutes, quality housing, health care, stable income, they've all gotten far, far worse for almost everyone, and there's nothing they can do about it.
Factory workers weren't (and even today really aren't) a replacement-level job that anyone can just go out and get. A guy making $4.50/hr at GM in 1970 had a great job that his peers would have envied; quite a lot of people who worked just as hard were making $3 or $2.
That data series is misleading because of what you're seeing. Ostensibly you'd think that means wages are going up, right? It doesn't. Here [1] is the data set for that - weekly real earnings. They're barely moving - up about 13% over 50 years. And given now a days we have a lot of new and practically mandatory costs to deal with, such as internet and computing/telephony devices, real wages are probably down in practical terms.
So what gives with your data set? The data set I give covers wages for full time workers. The data set you gave covers all individuals 15+ with any "income", which includes governments benefits. So what you're likely seeing there is going to be, in part, driven by things like an aging population - with a large number of retirees retiring with social security, medicaid, pensions, etc fattening out the middle part of society where income, after all is accounted for, of around $40k sounds just about right. It's mostly unrelated to the change in wages.
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Also, unrelated but I found your examples of 'better life' weird. I still hand wish dishes and line-dry clothes. I know Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates also hand wash their dishes. The "nostalgia" people have is for things like somebody graduating debt free, with a decent car, and ready to put a down payment on the first home - on the back of a part time job that put them through school. That really did happen, but now a days it sounds like a fantasy. I think society would happily trade dish washers for that!
While you are correct that real wages are up around 25%, productivity has nearly doubled. While various consumer goods, and technology have seen large improvements - ignoring the measurable and qualitative ways that affording basic aspects of life have become more difficult is not wise.
'Hand washing dishes' was replaced with 'get a low paying job to be a second household earner'. Considering this, has the standard of living really increased?
I think many women were happy that they could get an education and job to make their life more interesting besides being the house slave of their husband.
It’s certainly hyperbolic but lack of autonomy and complete financial dependence were pretty par for the course for women back in the day.
My grandma slowly squirreled away money in a shoe box over decades as she had no personal bank account and lived on what my grandpa provided while she took care of seven kids. She saw it as her lifeline. Meanwhile he got drunk every night at the yacht club.
When the last of the kids were nearing college she spent that money on classes for clerical work and got a job.
I could not possibly imagine being in her shoes and I can imagine why a woman would be loathe to enter into such dependence on another person, regardless of how fulfilling child rearing and house keeping may be.
And the further you go back from there the worse it looks for women.
100% agreed - the lack of choice is terrible, and society is better now that women have more freedom.
I think what people look back and get nostalgia for is the fact that it was possible for one adult to stay at home full time. Now its not possible; we dont have a choice, everyone must work.
And many couples are tired of both having to go to work and outsource the childcare to third parties to be able to afford the mortgage which is high because everyone has two incomes.
And what about women who love their family and kids and would like to support the family by staying at home? Come on dude, calling it slavery is fucked up.
Do you feel superior or somehow you just make my argument not true because it didn't happen to you or anyone you know?
You definitely seem to be genuine asshole and I don't care what culture you were raised in because there are definitely nicer people from that culture.
I wouldn't characterize raising a family as slavery, I also won't debate the prevelance of domestic violence in Jewish families (those curious can google it), but pointing out that you're from a culture that represents a rounding error of the world population doesn't strengthen your argument.
I have no idea what your culture is, but the entire notion that domestic violence is something to be monitored and prevented by outsiders was invented very recently in most cultures. So my assumption is that it was pretty damn widespread everywhere, no matter what our ancestors like to tell us.
I assume this is just garden-variety "being racist on the Internet" commentary, but in case you actually believe this: go ask ChatGPT for a list of the sections that urge murder and violence against women in any given holy text.
Thank you for chart. I will reassess real income gains. I'd be lovely to have a chart on housing/rent, healthcare, and higher education to see if people had both higher income and expenses.
Global trade as made consumer prices competitive in many things, but those are a big three.
Global trade has made shippable commodities cheaper, so purely local expenses such as housing, healthcare, and education are relatively more expensive. Especially as inflation measurements include items from both categories.
This is why many places in the world no longer produce enough food to feed their populations - refrigeration and cheap oil enable food to no longer be a local commodity. Education is sometimes headed in the same direction. But housing cannot be sourced anywhere but locally.
Clothes dryers are a sign of shrinking real estate, not a sign of luxury.
When one lives in a tiny apartment with no balcony, you better have a dryer. When living with plenty of land, it's not a problem to hang clothes to dry in the sun.
> Clothes dryers are a sign of shrinking real estate, not a sign of luxury.
My euro family disagrees, even in places that don’t have a balcony. Get the rack out and dry indoors and it’s pretty dry overnight (in the not so humid places).
I have a dryer but avoid it for most clothes because I think it wears them out.
A lot of rent agreements in then UK explicitly forbid tenants from drying clothes indoors on a rack because it is claimed that it raises humidity and the risk of mould (being an already quite damp, cold country)
That's because UK rental homes for the hoi polloi are notoriously badly insulated, ventilated, and heated. The landlords are blaming the tenants for the landlords' failings.
Plenty of old photos of people running drying lines between them and the opposite tenement building. Not saying people should do that today, just that it's what people did when they had neither space nor means to buy a dryer (or before dryers were invented)
Many Americans would love to do this today, but every apartment I've rented in the last 15 years has strict rules against drying clothes outside along with other restrictions on what you're allowed to place or store on patios and balconies there. Most of the rules seem to be in place purely so that the complex/tower doesn't look "poor" or "trashy"
It's pretty much only Americans who think clothes on clothes lines makes a place look "poor".
Consumerism demands that everyone buys a tumble dryer, therefore not having a tumble dryer means you're a povvo!
Meanwhile, in civilisation, I have a washer, a dryer, and a collapsible wall-mounted clothesline in my apartment, and I can choose which piece of clothing goes where to dry depending on need!
You have indoor heating, right? Clothes dry just fine on a rack indoors (albeit you may need some way to remove the resulting humidity if your heating system isn't doing that job already)
One of the most indulgent approaches when money is no object, is to have enough luxurious time to be able to fix your own food, do your own dishes, and wash your own laundry.
I've been handwashing my dishes for a long time and now have a dishwasher. One of the main benefits is having a place to store the dirty dishes until there are enough to make it worth washing. I used to do 3 washes a day, with 2 tiny ones.
Many households in European countries such as Germany or Finland line-dry clothes, and I would argue living standards are higher in those countries compared to the US.
Nooo. Wages only jumped in the Tech biz just before the dot-com crash and again before the AI crash that hasn't happened yet (unless you count laying off workers to pay for capX on NVIDIA hahaha). Bottom line: McDonalds is paying $20/hr now in California to flip burgers --YUUUGE, but a whole lot of people lost their jobs when major automobile manufacturers laid them off because they "didn't want to compete with McDonalds for workers"...where is that in your "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" (I'mma change that to "and LLMs" rofl).
*-nevermind the $10000 workstation named after a gf or more recently $2000 orange phones (I bought a DEEP Blue because Apple is always threatening to "Care-Deeply" me), $1000 watches and $300 earpieces for errbody. So Hungry. Also, we'll make sure you never work anywhere in Tech again if you even so much as interview for a new job outside of our company and Non-Competes Are No Longer Blocked! But What the Helly..Turtleneck also didn't invent the hungry mantra which is embraced by many other similar brilliant people, from Einstein to Elon'n-on and of course, my dad's gang one of whom brought Turtleneck back to Apple.) Get it? Got it? Good.
I can’t comment on the nostalgia aspect, because I wasn’t alive back then, but I can say that there are several aspects of the statistic you used that make it not reflective of the experience people have.
One issue is median real income does not tell you anything about the distribution of income. It can be used to show that the top 50% of people have had “real income growth”, but can hide a lot at both extremes; the poor and rich have had vastly different experiences [1]. The metric on that page looks at “share of national income”, so it has issues as well (not anchored to any objective measures), but it illustrates my point just as well.
The bigger issue I find is the way that “real income” is measured. There are a slew of issues, IMO (hedonic adjustment, for instance), but the biggest is the way that asset prices are treated in CPI - that is to say, they are not! Shelter prices reflect “owner equivalent rent”, not the price to actually buy a home, which has ballooned massively in the last few decades, especially the past five years, relative to income [2]. The same applies to other assets such as stocks; they are nowhere in the CPI metric, but have a direct impact on our lives; higher-priced stocks impeded the purchasing ability of people with respect to stocks, costing them returns over time (couple this with the larger cost of other assets over time and it is clear retirement age will have to go up). So, yes, maybe real income has increased, but substitutions are being made and tricks are being played; more people are renting longer because of home prices. Future returns on investments will be lower because of a giant asset bubble.
Also, future liabilities are nowhere to be seen in the real income metrics. The national debt that the US has saddled its current and future citizens with is shameful and will inevitably cause financial drag in the future (could be higher tax rates, but my personal bet is persistently higher inflation over time; you can already see the Fed giving up on its 2% target).
You must be looking at some serious equations and related data.
If you were alive back then you would have watched as inflation appeared "out of nowhere" and before long it was obvious that dollars were going to buy less & less each year for the foreseeable future. Government benefits needed to be tied to inflation under emergency conditions or everyone was going to be voted out by millions that were now underwater otherwise.
So they needed something to gauge inflation by and tie benefit dollar increases to, and ended up inventing the CPI.
The CPI was not expected to be very good, just quick. To say expectations were "highly manipulated" would be an understatement. If people didn't settle for something quite deficient in realism to begin with, who knows how many legislative sessions it might take? People could lose everything in that much time.
The exact purpose of CPI was carefully crafted to minimize the appearance of inflation as much as possible and get away with it. It was plain to see as it went along, like any other slow-motion dumpster fire that lawmakers go through when almost none of their intents are entirely honorable.
And CPI just became more laughable ever since.
But that wasn't enough.
Then one day the GDP comes along, with "reasonable" excuses about how multinational American companies are not like they used to be, so good old GNP can no longer act as the best measure going forward.
GDP was even more carefully crafted to minimize the appearance of non-prosperity and inflation, allowing it to run its course under the radar if it could just be brought low enough (but not low enough to be tolerable all the way back when things were really prosperous). Without knowing if that could even be achieved, it was plain to see when overprovisioning was taking place to try and compensate. There's nothing like a long, deep massage of the figures, and "feelings" can improve remarkably if the most obvious pain points are addressed. Temporarily of course.
You will notice that it is never obvious when the overnight transition from GNP to GDP took place. You had to be there. All the old data has been "refactored" creatively as designed in an attempt to make "comparison more valid". Who would benefit or not if people were still able to compare apples to apples, and who makes the rules anyway? By this time after all these years without recovery, "sentiment" was thought to be the only salvation possible, but even the most positive outlook couldn't help consumers who had lost their purchasing power. But a consumer economy was going to be the only road to "recovery", they had to keep spending just to survive regardless of how anemic it was by then.
Anyway the stock market crashes, continuous devaluation of the dollar for years, millions of layoffs, and consumers (millions of who could not afford US-made cars or other products any more) who were increasingly offered foreign alternatives they would readily purchase as much as they can -- all ran their course and it was not enough to end the most ridiculous part of the madness.
There had to be an oil crash and a real estate crash too, before things could finally level out under that old radar beam.
> It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.
Propaganda is very effective, and Americans are the most skillful propagandists in the world. Immigration is as pro-capital and anti-labor as you can get, yet somehow the left has been convinced to support it.
> Immigration is as pro-capital and anti-labor as you can get, yet somehow the left has been convinced to support it.
"Immigration" as such is a made up concept. The legal and physical barriers created by immigration policy are pro-capital and anti-labor. If people could freely move around the world, you can bet there'd be much more focus on pro-labor policies.
Are "Americans the most skillful propagandists"? Not Russians, not communist, not new age populist dictatorships?
That doesn't mean the teflon president isn't just now blatantly silencing the voices of the opposition (Kimmel and then a general warning) so he definitely wants a place in the competition.
Oh we absolutely are, and it's not even close. I'd almost take pride in it were it not so ruinous for everyone.
We've gone from philosophers like DeBord and Baudrillard painting a somewhat manic vision of the future, to actually living in this hyper-real mirror of some actual society that no longer exists, mostly courtesy of a global American cultural hegemony. People are willing to risk being fatally shot, to engage in anti-social behavior, or to martyr themselves all in the name of some form of second order "engagement".
The current state of propaganda is such that even the more modern concepts taught in a polisci class on ideology & propaganda, such as banal nationalism, are completely outdated, and are about as quaint as a lot of soviet era concepts. Propaganda is now able to be delivered in the form of hyper-personalized content, where the content itself not even need be propaganda, control of the recommendation engine selecting what a person sees and doesn't see is more than enough.
> It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.
Why's that? The jobs and lives of individuals in those countries are better than the alternatives present otherwise to them. Globalization may hurt certain America jobs but certainly countries like India is grateful for all of the engineering roles.
High consumerism is harmful to the environment but I don't think the link between offshoring jobs is direct to environmental harms and certainly it's helpful to giving more job opportunites.
Insofar as a "pro-labour" position exists in practice it has to be anti-globalist. If pro-labour is going to mean something it has to mean trying to get labour a better deal than a free market would offer, otherwise it isn't really taking a position on labour at all. A key part of globalism is it makes it impossible for labour in any given country to avoid being paid the market price for their labour.
Environmentalism is similar. Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets.
You seem to be arguing that globalism makes the world better off. I agree, but that is because pro-labour and pro-environmentalist ideologies are pretty explicit that they aren't trying to maximise the general welfare. A situation where one soul works very hard and happily for little pay making things for everyone else could be a good outcome for everyone (see also: economic comparative advantage). The pro-labour position would resist that outcome on the basis that the labourer is not making very much money. And the environmentalist would probably be unhappy with the amount of pollution that the hard work generates. The globalist would call it a win.
Globalism as an ideology is distinct from globalization of trade. Globalists would argue for expansive supranational regulatory controls. Migration and alleged environmental concerns are typical rationalizations for their expanding powers. The distinction is better understood as between a set of liberal, laissez-faire trade policies and an emerging illiberal supranational regulatory state.
Specifically when you say:
>Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets.
We can observe that the Globalist organizations regard not just pollution, but carbon consumption to be something which markets cannot be trusted to manage. Instead they propose top-down regulatory management on a supranational level.
> If pro-labour is going to mean something it has to mean trying to get labour a better deal than a free market would offer, otherwise it isn't really taking a position on labour at all
I think you're assuming here that 'a better deal' means 'more money than someone else', whereas lots of people would define it as 'everyone has more rights/security'.
I'm very much free trade and pro-globalization, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that a candidate for political office in country X should be most concerned about the overall welfare of the citizens of country X, then next for the non-citizen residents of country X, then non-citizen/non-residents last. We can argue how steep the dropoff should be, but I think most people would believe that the ordering is that one, with some possible ties.
Overall welfare is about more than just income though. It’s about national security, the cost of living, and the benefits of things like innovation, technology, culture.
Let’s look at US imports from China. Last year that was $462bn worth of goods. Suppose the development of China never happened and all those goods were manufactured in the USA instead. That’s impossible, the US doesn’t have tens of millions of industrial workers lying around spare to do those mostly low end, low value jobs and if it did they would cost more and the goods would all be much more expensive. So the cost of living would go up, the economy would less efficient because many workers would be doing lower value add jobs than they are now. The country would be much worse off overall. It would basically amount to enormous government subsidies and protections for vast swathes of lower value assembly work than what many people are doing now.
I support global trade because I think it’s best for the west. Not hyper-liberal ultra free market trade. Negotiated, rules based, moderately regulated trade and investment that is balanced to meet domestic and international needs.
In the recent podcast Balaji said, both Red and Blue America will start hating Tech for distinct reasons. Red America will hate for H1Bs. Blue will hate for AI displacing high paying white collar jobs.
They may not care about Suresh specifically, but they're probably happier than if no one in their country had a well-paying tech job. Suresh and his tech worker colleagues don't sit on Scrooge McDuck piles of gold coins; instead they spend the money in their country and community.
I'm pretty sure my local pizza shop, waitstaff, and other small businesses are happy to have my money spent on their products and services. They don't care that I have a tech job, but they do care that I spend money with them, and spending money with them is only one degree of separation from having a job.
I could see that being the case in a scenario where all countries had strong labor protections. However, in practice globalism tends to result in jobs being exported from countries with strong protections to countries with weak protections. In that sense it is anti-labor.
In the case of bringing in workers; those workers are less likely to join unions or demand good working conditions since they are effectively indentured servants. That also is bad for labor.
Labor share of US GDP is usually around 60%, which is comparable to Europe.
If you divide the GDP by the number of employed people (including self-employed and entrepreneurs), you get a bit over $180k/person. The median full-time income is a bit over $60k. In other words, as a gross simplification, the mean worker earns 80% more than the median worker.
The comparable numbers for Germany are a ~€100k, ~€45k, and 35%. If something is hollowing out the American middle class, it might be the high earners rather than the capital.
Your numbers don't sound that bad, and it's actually why people still come to America for opportunity. It's because the mean > median that makes America more desirable than Germany.
Exactly this. And the main "equalizing" factor in Germany is taxes, round about 50% of Germany's labor share of GDP for average earners consists of taxes and social security contributions. Which is exactly what the Republican campaign has been all about - minimize taxes and cut spending wherever possible. Yes, you get a vastly more unequal and in many cases just flat out inhumane society. But if you can manage to be part of the "upper" class for a few years it pays so well that it becomes very appealing to a lot of people all over the world.
Yep. It's the same reason those tiny oil countries in the Arab Gulf are popular. You can work a few years to save big and go home. There's a underclass of slaves below you that keep the country running, but if you're not a slave yourself, it's easy to ignore that.
America is similar. Ignore the homeless, the people who can't afford basic trips to the doctor, the illegal immigrant underclass, hope the crime problem never affects you, and focus on your own money, and it's fine.
>> a nice place to raise a family
is it? No free childcare, no free medicine, no free urgent care and almost no third places for children. Add to that almost no food regulation. And, for immigrants, no support from their parents
What's nice about that, getting into debt as soon as one of us gets medical emergency? Or staying in a suburban home 24/7 with a child until they can go to school?
I'm guessing you are not (and will never become) a citizen to your birth country. And your parents left because it was not a great place to raise you, you are probably in a better country now.
> But if you can manage to be part of the "upper" class for a few years it pays so well that it becomes very appealing to a lot of people all over the world.
Unfortunately last several millions came for exactly the opposite. Free full government support, aka communism.
They'd be much better off in Germany, Portugal, Denmark, France, or Sweden. Which incidentally all rely on immigrants to hold up their paygo retirement schemes, so it's mutually beneficial.
Who? Illegal immigrants pay a lot in taxes and actually get less for the taxes they pay because they aren't eligible for welfare like fox news says they are.
It’s important to clarify that H-1B is a non-immigrant visa — you don’t get to stay if you lose your job. That matters because the debate isn’t about immigration itself but about how the program functions. H-1B was meant to supplement shortages in highly skilled roles. Over time, though, it’s reshaped whole categories of employment. Anecdotally, I see very few young U.S. devs compared to many late-career ones finishing out their working lives. If we dare to use the term “national interest,” the real issue is whether a temporary labor program has morphed into something that permanently alters the market.
It’s a non immigrant visa but also a pathway to citizenship.
And this is not just an abstract thing. There are, for example, very specific tax implications of this.
The dual intent nature of the H1B visa means the U.S. government requires H1B holders to pay Social Security and Medicare, precisely because the dual intent nature implies that they will be able to utilize those entitlements in the future.
You’re right — H-1B is dual intent. But my main point still stands: conflating H-1Bs with “immigrants hollowing out the middle class” is misleading. H-1B was designed to address shortfalls in skilled labor by granting temporary work authorization to foreign workers. On paper, it’s a fine idea.
In practice, the program has been abused, by body shops for instance, that we ended up with a new word: insourcing. That’s the real issue, and not immigration per se, but the way a temporary labor program reshaped whole categories of employment. And while politicians sometimes talk about fixing it, I wouldn’t expect much. If anything, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the “dual intent” aspect pared back in the future under the current guy.
It's false because "dual intent" applies explicitly only to non-immigrant visas and the term is referencing the applicants intent. There are no pathways from a non-immigrant visa to citizenship in the US.
The upper-income tier grew from 14% -> 21% as the middle-income tier shrank from 61% to 50%. To be perfectly fair, the lower-income tier class did also increase from 25% to 29%. The story is complicated.
As you said, the story is complicated. Even in 2015, a decade ago:
> There is one other stark difference: only upper-income families realized notable gains in wealth from 1983 to 2013.
During the period of analysis then, either consumption among the lower two tiers eliminated their available savings ability, or the real purchasing power over this period declined, leading to the same effect.
If your view was true, we would have a super-successful middle class here in Europe. We don't, quite the contrary. The UK used to be on par with the USA. Now, it's stagnant since 2008. Other countries are falling behind too.
Because power of labor to negotiate is a zero-sum game that doesn't create anything. The only sustainable way to lift anyone's living standard is through improving prosperity.
And guess what. The USA gives much better opportunities for motivated people to build themselves.
The hollowing out of the American middle class is because the huge, wealthy middle class was a post-war anomaly, from a time when the US had the only intact industrial plant in the world, and lack of communication technology and logistical sophistication meant production had to be localized and centralized. So, if you happened to be living in the right places in the US, you could have a house and a car and put a couple kids through college on an (artificially-inflated) factory worker's wage. At the same time, 80% of the population of the world was on the edge of starvation.
Now, thanks to better logistics and communications, companies can move jobs to where labor is cheaper. This has pulled billions of people out of poverty, dramatically reduced the price of goods, and generally improved global well-being--but that was at the cost of the 1% of the 1950s, which is to say the American working class. Now, if you work in a factory in the US, you only make a single-digit multiple of what a factory worker in Korea, Mexico, Germany or Italy makes (though you still have a double-digit advantage on much of the world).
It wasn't sustainable to have a tremendously wealthy middle class in a world that was mostly starving. No amount of trade barriers could maintain that: you're relying on a world market with very little competition, and the other 7 billion people aren't going to be content to sit on their hands.
What you want to do instead is to develop new, cutting-edge, high-paying industries, and thereby keep a competitive advantage on the rest of the world. Maybe you could, I dunno, develop top-notch schools to lure all the best and brightest people from around the world to your country, invite them in, encourage them to stay, and get them to innovate and create here rather than elsewhere. That might just result in whole new, massive, high-paying industries that pick up the slack left by your diminished industrial dominance.
Seems like a good idea to me! But hey, instead, you could always try slamming the door shut, chase out all the dirty foreigners, and just rely on your inherent and intrinsic American superiority to carry you forward. I'm sure that'll work just as well.
One of the big changes in the post war era was that immigration was massively opened up in 1965. From 1924 to 1965 the US had very restrictive immigration laws, which led to labor shortages, which allowed unions to become strong, rising wages and the expansion of the middle class. Since 1965 we've had declining union participation.
This is simple supply and demand. If you restrict the labor supply, the value of labor increases.
The same thing was observed after the Black Death, which killed off 30 to 50% of Europe's population. There were labor shortages, which increased the bargaining power of labor, and increased wages.
It's really funny US companies suddenly start pretending they don't believe in supply and demand when it comes to labor.
You really going to mention all that, which had some impact on the US middle class, but you're not going to mention anything about the US "wealth distribution" dynamics which has had its regulations and protections removed to the demise of the middle class?? Income tax roof being more than double before, corps being taxed more than double, the top earner vs bottom earner of any corporation much closer.. Less workarounds, no-one using the stupid "buy-borrow-die" strategy that is all too common now..
That's just the byproduct of the rest of the world coming back online (plus communications & logistics improving).
Look, if you own a company, or are in a leadership position: the entire world is now open to you, both as source of labor and as potential market. The impact of your decisions has exploded, and the potential revenue and value of your company has also exploded.
OTOH, if you're a line-worker at a factory in Detroit: your competition is now most of the population of the world--and they all expect lower salaries than you do.
What's your argument for why you should keep making 10x or 20x what people in China or India make? Do you just naturally deserve it? Do you figure that companies owe it to you because you share a home country? If so, either the company will bounce and move abroad to one of the many countries willing to welcome them with open arms--or they'll be swiftly replaced by a Chinese equivalent which has 1/10th the labor costs. Either way, your extravagant salary is going to dry up.
American labor in the 50s was simply in the right place at the right time. That's no longer true. There's no way to stop the rest of the world from growing and improving in order to maintain the special status of the American worker. They don't really have a choice: they need to skill up. And yes, push for better social safety nets, though their instinct seems to be in the opposite direction.
My point is that the decline of the US middle class is largely the result of domestic wealth distribution choices. And wealth distribution is measured within an economy, not by comparing wages between countries..
And we're debating different worlds if your baseline is shareholder primacy.. While my baseline is a democratic society where corporations are tools to organize people to deliver value to society, and owing obligations to that society, not a mechanism to siphon wealth from the bottom to the top.
The elephant in the room is how dismal more and more Americans quality of life is. Home ownership is out of reach. Living in the city at all is often out of reach. They have to work multiple jobs and those jobs often mistreat them.
I can see the argument that a large and super consumerist middle class might not be sustainable. However, for society to function, the alternative still needs to provide people with a decent quality of life.
Home ownership rate is higher now than it ever was in the post-war period, actually. It peaked in 2008, and has fallen since then...still higher than the 50s and 60s.
Also, did you ever spend any time in those post-war homes? Most of us would be appalled at the idea of living in a bare-bones 1000 sqft box (with more than 2x as many children per average family).
This argument never made sense to me. Why would the rest of the world being poor cause a huge middle class in America? Why would the rest of the world recovering cause the US to suddenly get poorer.
Like post post ww2 say we produced 1 car for every American. Also we produced 1 house for every American. Every car and house was produced in America because Europe was bombed to shit. Now 20 years later, Europe has recovered a bit and can start producing cars and houses again. Why wouldn't the US still be able to produce 1 car for every adult? Oh sorry, Germany is no longer a pile of rubble, you and your spouse need to share a car now. Also your adult kids need to move back in with you, no house for them either.
This is obviously absurd. US would be even richer since they no longer had to spend massive amounts of money funding the war effort and then massive amounts of money rebuilding Europe. Hollowing out the US middle class was a choice, not some law of nature.
After WW2, Europe and Asia were rubble, and needed to rebuild. And the systems, structures, and customs that had existed pre-war had fallen apart. They all needed, simultaneously, to rebuild and modernize.
To do that, they needed cars, machinery, home goods, electronics, etc. They had the labor to produce those things, but not the infrastructure. It takes time to build factories, and a skilled labor pool, and a logistics network, and so on.
So where did you go to get the goods & services you needed to rebuild? There was really only one option. The US was exporting cars, factory equipment, heavy machinery, steel, radio, coca cola, etc. They had an intact industrial plant, and had lost (relatively speaking) very few working-age men in the war. That helped them ramp up quickly with internal demand (fed by pent-up war wages).
For reasons laid out above, it wasn't practical to move factories overseas, or outsource parts, or automate. So workers in the areas with factories were in very high demand, and wages went way, way up in those areas. That had knock-on effects: America was just beginning to import oil in large quantities, so American coal & oil was suddenly in high demand. Same with mining, logging, etc. That caused a general boom--specifically favoring labor.
It wasn't because the rest of the world was poor that the American middle class was rich. It was because the rest of the world was developing, and America had a near-monopoly on the means of doing it. What's happened in the meantime is just that the US has lost that monopoly. Now American workers face relatively fair competition. This has been a huge net positive for the world, with cheaper goods and higher wages pretty much across the board...except for American workers.
Where is this wealth coming from though? The other countries aren't producing anything, everything is being produced by America. America would have to produce everything both for the domestic market and the entire rest of the world. And consequently why does this wealth suddenly disappear once the rest of the world catches up. You are talking about demand, but don't mention supply.
So, if I understand correctly, your view we should continue pretend the H1-B is something called a "genius visa" and the best bet for prosperity is not for current citizens to have well-paying jobs but to increasingly import people from other nations and pay them less?
The US population is 4 per cent of the entire world's, which means that the vast majority of talented humans is born abroad.
If you can snatch them, they will build SpaceX or Google for you. If not, well, they will do so either elsewhere, or not at all. (South Africa does not seem to be a good place to start business, and neither is Russia.)
Can you gain prosperity by employing three mediocre people instead of one talented one? Maybe, but you won't get a new vibrant sector like Silicon Valley this way.
Europe, where I live, is a lot more gung-ho on mediocrity and forced equality, and we seem to be the ones with clearly stagnating living standards, not you.
So you'd be better-off if SpaceX and Google were Chinese companies?
Also, a lot of the wealth from the tech industry does spill over to the larger community. You're strictly better off having it. If the US had just stuck with their 1970s economy on the theory that any new industries wouldn't distribute their benefits equally, it would be vastly smaller, less powerful and less wealthy. Surely that's obvious?
I don't think that human talent is completely homogeneous, there are certainly places where there is more of it than elsewhere.
That said, I think you underestimate many places. For example, Iran is one of the most ancient civilizations out there, and the Persian diaspora in the US is pretty productive, even though the country proper is a retrograde tyranny with very bad economy.
Iran is not very homogenous. Never was. Something very noticeable with the Iranians here in Denmark is that a lot of them think of themselves as well educated upper middle class despite having fairly average brain power. I've met plenty of nice and likeable people who fled from Iran but their talents don't match their self image.
If by hollowing you mean the reduction of the size of the middle class, it is because it has become richer, not poorer over time, so I don't think your take is right.
I've heard about the shrinking middle class in the US since around 1990. It somehow doesn't actually seem to be smaller now than it was 35 years ago. More and more ordinary from the bottom third of the population can afford things that used to be reserved for the upper third.
Are you sure it's really been/being hollowed out or are you just repeating something you've heard or read other people state so often that you think it's true?
That's not been my experience. Technology has advanced such that there are things that used to be expensive that are not any more. However, I don't see more people who are able to live middle class lifestyles. Things like owning their own homes, not having roommates, being able to leave demeaning jobs, only having to work one job, raising a family on a single income, etc.
This doesn't map exactly to "middle class" but it also seems like there's now a lot less ability for people to afford to work in "artist" type careers. It used to be that you could wait tables, get a low cost studio in the city, and work as an artist in the evenings/weekends. Now you have to work multiple jobs and probably still can't afford to live in the city and make art.
The thing you're ignoring though is that main way you reduce the power of labor is by increasing its supply.
For instance one of the key factors in society escaping feudalism and moving onto market based economies was the Black Death. It absolutely decimated society and the labor pool. This gave labor the power to demand more compensation than a share of what they produced. But in times before if they tried that then nobility could simply have said no, as there were plenty of peasants willing to work for little more than food. But when the labor supply was suddenly cut in half? Now they had all the power in the world.
Labor unions can't really combat market forces. I don't even think ethical or moral arguments work either. If somebody, in the country legally, is willing to do your job for less money, and is capable of doing so, then by what right do you have to insist that you should be the one doing your job and getting paid more? It doesn't really make much sense. If you want to increase the power of labor then, by far, the easiest way to reduce so is to reduce the supply of labor. And vice versa for weakening it.
>The hollowing out of the middle class in the US isn't because of immigrants, it's because of a sustained campaign by capital to reduce the power of labor
Importing cheap foreign labor to undercut unions and lower wages is one of the spokes of the wheel used by capital to reduce the power of labor (and always has been).
Much the same as in a strike when workers get mad at scabs. The person right there in front of you is looking out for their own best interests and in those circumstances that is to your detriment.
Capital uses immigrant labor partly for simple price reasons and partly because those workers interests really are different from the locals and their lack of local connection makes them a viable slow motion scab workforce.
> to reduce the power of labor over the last 50-odd years and to concentrate wealth as best they can.
What happened 50 years ago? Hart-Cellar was in 1965. The foreign-born population dipped below 5% in 1970. It’s 15% today. This had major political ramifications. Democrats were able to move to the right economically because they could substitute labor voters demanding structural reforms with recent immigrant voters who would be happy with relatively small handouts from the government, or even just visas for their extended family.
Thank you for illustrating a point that's hard to make, which is ... on this website everyone understands the math for supply and demand. Except when it comes to immigration. When it's about immigration, it's the evil capitalists. Again, thanks. We should all know by now that when the supply of labor increases, there is Zero affect on wages.
If there's a different metric go ahead and suggest one. I know you're trying to bait a comment with the BLS reference. It used to be commonplace to observe that GDP is actually a very bad way to measure a country's performance, because it skips over things like income inequality or upward mobility. USSR had great GDP numbers, actually, despite the propaganda in the west at the time. Unfortunately everyone was miserable and, well, the rest is history.
> I know you're trying to bait a comment with the BLS reference
I am not. I am generally confused at what you would suggest is wrong with the GDP measurement.
We have multiple layers of agencies reporting on GDP and other economic measures the US. There are certainly some troublesome siloed measures (CPI), but I wasn't aware that GDP was one of them.
Your take doesn't seem relevant with regard to my knowledge on the subject.
My point is that measuring things via GDP alone is bad and/or dumb. I think that was pretty clear in my comment. "Number go up" is not a sane way to measure progress.
I also do not care about your "knowledge" on the subject.
Correction. It has become fashionable to claim that GDP doesn't matter, mostly from the people who are greatly losing the GDP race and whose policies will be bad for GDP and they know it. I mean, the fox at least has excuse for finding the grapes sour because they are toxic to vulpines.
They also remain willfully ignorant about the context of GDP - namely that it was derived as a proxy for military productive and research capacity. It specifically isn't just raw industrial capacity because the intellectual research and development work is also very relevant in military match-ups.
Who exactly is losing this race? Because it isn’t the United States. If infinite immigration was such a great GPD hack then Canada and the uk would be in the lead and yet the exact opposite happened.
Zuckerberg's compound didn't make the Bay Area housing crisis and Barron Trump isn't why NYU is expensive or hard to get into. Giving everyone involved $1 million from Larry Ellison's pocket wouldn't particularly change either.
That's not to say you shouldn't do it! But the problem is elsewhere.
If you gave everyone the amount of money Larry Ellison has (we could just print it) then Larry's wealth would be equal to everyone and he or Zuck couldn't afford a compound.
But Zuckerberg hoarding 100s of billions of dollars of wealth far less productively than say a family in poverty on food stamps would slows the velocity of money and also keeps that money out of the broader economy.
Production of the staples of middle class life, like homes in decent neighborhoods and seats in decent schools, is limited more by the use of middle class political power to restrict it than by a lack of capital or demand. More money for consumption might help with already-cheap consumer goods, but it only drives inflation in the core class markers.
Idk what visa program was is under, but home depot used to bring in immigrants to run their stores (stockers , cashiers, etc ) under a program that meant that some contractor was putting 12 people in a 3 bedroom apartment and charging them big fees to come work for minimum wage. This was a while ago, but I was in the rental business and got to see it first hand and talk to the workers. It was extremely exploitative. 5 years ago they were still doing it my hometown, I haven’t checked since. It was mostly Eastern Europeans.
The occupation requires:
Theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge; and
Attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree in a directly related* specific specialty (or its equivalent) as a minimum for entry into the occupation in the United States.
The position must also meet one of the following criteria to qualify as a specialty occupation:
A U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, is normally the minimum entry requirement for the particular occupation;
A U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, is normally required to perform job duties in parallel positions among similar organizations in the employer’s industry in the United States;
The employer, or third party if the beneficiary will be staffed to that third party, normally requires a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, to perform the job duties of the position; or
The specific duties of the offered position are so specialized, complex, or unique that the knowledge required to perform them is normally associated with the attainment of a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent.*
The positions that you're describing do not meet the criteria for the H-1B. If it was under the H-1B, then it should have been reported for fraud.
Chances are this was done as a seasonal H-2B non-agricultural worker (likely under a seasonal need)
To qualify for H-2B nonimmigrant classification, the petitioner must establish that:
There are not enough U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available to do the temporary work.
Employing H-2B workers will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.
“Seasonal need” to work from June to December, then another “season” from January to June lol. They would be on a 6on,6 off rotation, staggered with their replacements. I do recall though that there was a huge local hiring spree a few years back, so maybe they got audited.
The problem (for them) is that pay scales (and cost of living) in that area are above average. A friend of my son got a job there about 8 years ago and it paid about 63k plus benefits, whereas the average home depot employee makes about 32k. No idea what it’s like post COVID.
If someone sees visa fraud, it should be reported. There are programs to try to combat it, though this is a "UCIS doesn't have the resources to audit every company."
Ignoring visa fraud is one of the ways that it becomes established and in turn makes it harder for the companies that are following the rules to be successful.
At the time, I really didn’t know it was likely fraud due to the low pay aspect. Interesting though about the 6 on 6off, since it looks like they could stay 3 years?
Perhaps that was so they could keep everyone “in the system” by not allowing them to be established, or something? I’m not really sure, but I think it worked kind of like a temp agency, but I believe the pay checks were issued directly by home depot, so I’m really not sure how everything was organized.
The house had an “agent”/handler that basically they had to obey, even though they worked for HD… it felt really Mob-like, with prohibition on dating, being out late, etc and strict organization of work schedules for room sharing.
But they paid 2x normal rent, all in advance, 6 months at a time and the apartments were always in great shape, so the property owner loved them.
Whatever it was it sure smelled like some kind of trafficking to me but I could never put my finger on the exact issue, and they all seemed genuinely grateful to be there. It did seem super shady though.
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It’s likely an H2 visa (assuming it’s not undocumented immigrants). Which is unaffected and unchanged, likely because Trump properties are heavy users and dependent on these visas.
This is exactly correct. The H1B visa has not lived up to its original premise in quite some time. A very significant percentage of people who are now working on these visas are not offering anything beyond what is already available within the American workforce, except for lower compensation.
I’ve never worked with an H1B software engineer from India that was anything but mediocre. I know they exist and my sample size isn’t huge but at least 3-4 of the H1Bs I’ve directly worked with in the past decade were completely unnecessary and could have been filled by a US citizen
I think perhaps part of the point being made is that the ratio should not be the same. We should be bringing in higher-than-average and exceptional talent via these visas. If we're just mirroring the skills and talent level of the native workforce, we should be drawing from the native workforce.
I don't buy the argument that there's a big shortage of talent for these jobs in the US, especially in a job market like there is right now.
Having said that, I do know quite a few people who have been in the US on H-1B visas, and many of them are exceptionally skilled. I think those are the kinds of people we should be granting H-1B visas. I also know quite a few H-1B holders who I wouldn't ever want to work with again, and there are too many people in that group. Not saying there aren't plenty of US citizens I wouldn't want to work with ever again, but that's a separate issue.
> A very large majority of all software engineers are mediocre
I think my HN karma right now would be over 1,000,000 if it wasn't for all the downvotes each time I've said this same thing. I ballpark 95.87% of all SWEs are mediocre-to-less-than-that. I have 30 years of experience behind me to back this up :)
This "10x engineer" jazz is really just someone who is good-to-very-good compared to the rest of the crew
Mediocre means average. Most people will fit into average. If most H1B are average programmers the ratio wouldn't be equal just based on cultural differences / language and other baseline factors added.
Are you suggesting that those companies don't know they're hiring H-1B workers? It just sort of happens to them?
If they offer below-market (for American workers) salaries and get no sufficiently-qualified domestic candidates, as they're required to promise they do, it's no surprise to anyone that they're hiring a ton of H-1Bs. They want that because they want to pay less.
I don't blame them for doing what's fiscally advantageous for the shareholders up till now -- but I think I'll be glad to see this change implemented, if it is, because I know companies write on those forms "domestic talent not found" when they know the truth is "domestic talent not available at the wages we'd like to pay".
FAANG offers the exact same salaries to US citizens and those who need sponsorship. And speaking from personal experience, the majority of the Chinese and Indian immigrants at Meta are extremely talented and tremendously hard working. The best Americans are obsessed with startups and entrepreneurship and aren’t satisfied with being cogs in the machine the way H1B seekers are.
I’m not saying the system is perfect, we definitely need to work on clearing out these fraudulent consultancies and such. But FAANG H1Bs are good engineers and we would definitely be worse off without them. I much preferred the proposal to only allow H1B after a certain salary threshold of ~200-250k which seems like it would solve the issue.
If you already have an immigration status that allows you to work in the US then you're free to advocate for your worth by engaging with the job market. If a company has to sponsor you for an H1B though you'll be locked to one employer, and that lack of options is what means they don't need to give you market rates.
But yes, as far as I know companies would usually offer an H1B applicant lower salary. They know the candidate will need visa sponsorship because the candidate has to say up front (usually in the first conversation) if they are authorized to work in the US. If the companies know they will have to undertake costly sponsorship, and as far as I know employment law leaves them quite free to offer a lower salary: foreign nationals are not a protected class so salary discrimination on the basis of who will need visa sponsorship is just to be expected in the current system...
> If a company has to sponsor you for an H1B though you'll be locked to one employer, and that lack of options is what means they don't need to give you market rates.
You're not locked into one employer on an H1B. Once you are here it is possible to switch jobs relatively easily since you do not need to go through the lottery again.
> as far as I know employment law leaves them quite free to offer a lower salary
"The H-1B employer must pay its H-1B worker(s) at least the “required” wage which is the higher of the prevailing wage or the employer’s actual wage (in-house wage) for similarly employed workers."
The basic mechanics you're assuming are wrong - H1B is not locked to an employer, it can be easily transferred between employers. H1B is tied to having AN employer, but employees are free to switch between employers to get market rates and they do.
My understanding was that by changing jobs you could "lose your place in line" potentially costing you years of waiting in your overall immigration process.
That is true if you have something like an ongoing green card petition. However, if it's just an H1B, by the time it's approved and can transfer it, there's not really a "line" anymore.
Though there's pretty hard limitations on what you can transfer with - it has to be the same sector, similar limitations on minimum salary, and requires work on the new employer's part to move the H1B to them (so you can't keep it quiet, and it's another barrier as it's non-zero cost for lawyers etc. to actually do that).
Does your new company need to file paperwork? Have/consult an immigration lawyer? I know our jobs openings we always specified we weren't willing to sponsor because we didn't have the ability to do the overhead. Do you mean we could have hired H1Bs and my management teams were all mistaken?
most of us here have been hiring managers in the bay area so we have been exposed to this. My exposure was you are fairly locked into one company. I had friends who had to go home abruptly when fired. We would have to buy their cars so we could sell them slower at non-fire sale prices for them. But this was late 90s through early 2000s. Maybe it's different.
Changing or Leaving Your H-1B Employer
Q. What is “porting”?
A. There are two kinds of job portability, or “porting,” available based on two different kinds of employer petitions:
H-1B petition portability: Eligible H-1B nonimmigrants may begin working for a new employer as soon as the employer properly files a new H-1B petition (Form I-129) requesting to amend or extend H-1B status with USCIS, without waiting for the petition to be approved. More information about H-1B portability can be found on our H-1B Specialty Occupations page.
...
Q. How do I leave my current employer to start working for a new employer while remaining in H-1B status?
A. Under H-1B portability provisions, you may begin working for a new employer as soon as they properly file a non-frivolous H-1B petition on your behalf, or as of the requested start date on the petition, whichever is later. You are not required to wait for the new employer’s H-1B petition to be approved before beginning to work for the new employer, assuming certain conditions are met. For more details about H-1B portability, see our H-1B Specialty Occupations page, under “Changing Employers or Employment Terms with the Same Employer (Portability).”
The company would still need to file an H-1B petition. It's that there is no lottery guesswork since the potential employee is already approved to work within the United States.
When can I begin working for a new H-1B employer if I change employers?
If you are changing H-1B employers, you may begin working for the new employer as soon as they properly file a non-frivolous Form I-129 petition on your behalf, or as of the requested start date on that petition, whichever is later.
To be eligible for portability, you must not have been employed without authorization from the time of your last admission into the United States, and your new employer must properly file a new, non-frivolous petition before your H-1B period of authorized stay expires.
It is useless statistics. In 2024 out of all H1B approved only 2% are for FAANG(~7K out of 400K). The whole debate is about remaining ~95% (adding another 3% for truly hi-tech work). Thats where H1B abuse happening.
Promoters of H1B keep talking about highly talented H1Bs while ignoring a mass hired at very low end of tech jobs.
What do you mean "suggest"? Every single job application I've ever seen has a question about citizenship/status. And of course they'd know whether they need to file legal papers to employ you as H1B or not - it's not like it somehow happens in secret. They know who's visa worker and who's not.
No need to check immigration status. If they're non-white and have an accent it's already a tell you can lowball them. You'd probably skip over some white europeans with solid English, but lets be real, those people can fake being a US citizen easy enough with some trivially obtained paperwork.
That would be highly illegal: it'd be discrimination on the basis of race (which is protected under the law) rather than on the basis of immigration status (which is not protected).
The incentives ensure that it will happen with zero intent, and probably without the people doing it even realize they're doing it. It's not illegal to see someone, think of them as a 'sucker' but not even realize why, then lowball them, which is far more likely than for a person to actually consciously confront themselves they may be a racist.
In any case, even if they know it's illegal, it's not so easy to enforce, the fact that people get successfully sued or jailed a small fraction of the time isn't going to be some solace.
The only way to actually solve it is to remove the incentive in place, namely either the market pressure to get the best developer at the cheapest price or the vulnerability of being an immigrant.
We've all seen hiring managers that coincidentally hired only or nearly only their fellow countrymen, and nothing happens to them, even though it is highly illegal.
I'm speaking in a hypothetical, not something I've witnessed. I doubt anyone ever witnesses it willfully happen. All that is necessary is the incentives be in place for
1) Hiring manager to have incentive to hire quality talent at the most economical price
2) Foreign talent be more desperate than domestic talent
The effect is practically guaranteed even if there is exactly zero intent by the hiring manager or any conscious 'discrimination.' Incentives beget results and people may not ponder how they got there, and they often don't.
Unless you change (1) or (2) all the discrimination legislation, lawsuits, and 'training' in the world isn't worth the paper it is written on.
Or you could stop tying H-1Bs to employers, meaning that there's less incentive to do the work to bring "mid level talent" in at below market rates, because those people would immediately find a job at market rates.
There's a straightforward solution here. Right now H-1Bs are a way for companies to lock in employees by leveraging the visa status.
The problem with your solution (and similar solutions - e.g. implementing "salary auction" for H1B - i.e. it's not a lottery, but it's that the most paid get the visa) is:
It requires changing the law.
Which is very difficult, and requires a broad coalition in 2 houses of parliament.
On the other hand, executive orders are very easy.
I wish the better solutions get implemented, but until they are, we have to seek alternatives.
> Which is very difficult, and requires a broad coalition in 2 houses of parliament.
In the current moment the same party controls all three branches of government.
There's a more basic reality that the idea I'm mentioning simply wouldn't be popular. I just think that people talk about market forces in these discussions and the lock-in effect is so clearly something that's affecting the market, yet not mentioned nearly enough IMO.
I have worked with software people on H1B visas who's #1 goal was to hire more [specific nationality] and thin out the rest. Their work ethic was a top-down rule by fear, and their code was VERY bad. Made my life straight up worse. One example of abusing the H1B visa system.
I am skeptical that _that_ is what's hollowing the middle class in America, it's equally easy to point to income inequality for this. But you have your story you believe, I'm resigned that the die are already cast.
It's kind of sad to see the accelerated downfall of your country.
> it's equally easy to point to income inequality for this
Have you ever considered what causes income inequality? Maybe policy that favors globalist, ownership class over salaried workers? H1B in it's current form favors owners/managers over workers! We are saying the same thing. We have to analyze the causes of income inequality in order to solve it.
The Southern states that I'm aware of which have "strong economies" got that way by slashing worker and environmental protections. I don't think that's actually a compelling counterexample.
It's not the only reason, but it's one of the likely causes. Like most complex issues, it's multi-casual. You can't import 100k+ workers per year into a country and have no effect on wages! I understand the net economic impact is potentially positive, but I am speaking to the direct economic impact of the workers being displaced.
> But you have your story you believe, I'm resigned that the die are already cast.
But that is your story you believe, consider that the parent commenter has the exact same (mirrored) mindset.
A useful segue to avoid you or them "being resigned": given that you say you're "skeptical", what would be the minimal proof you'd consider valid for you to change your mind?
The discussion is already dead, there's no point trying to convince anyone because the discussion is politicized and the current admin doesn't care about petty things like reality. Whoever is right won't matter in this stage, it matters who's saying it.
I might be wrong, fully willing to cede the point, but this whole thing going on is more than _just this point_.
You seem to be suggesting that the H1B pulls wages up because the median pay is higher than the median overall pay in the country? That’s not a valid comparison, you’d have to compare the H1B’s salary to the median pay in their specialty.
Not only that, but you'd have to do a study to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the US, and that an increased supply of workers didn't drag down salaries, either short or long-term. Immigration helps the countries top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country.
There used to be a much stronger push for education in the US. Perhaps if companies could not "just hire from overseas" or "just outsource" there would be a longer term growth strategy that would focus more on the education of the US population (not just training for this or that job).
It did seem in the past that there was much more of an all-hands-on-deck attitude towards education throughout US corporate activities, more broadly focused on the general fields the various companies valued the most. I suspect this fall off is very real, but don't actually know if that is just my impression or if there is a concrete effect from modern economic structures.
It's an important enough question it should definitely be studied and taken into account in policy.
However I can't agree with your conclusion that "Immigration helps the countries [sic] top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country". That requires meta studies that I have never seen to prove it is so. I could cautiously accept that "some types of immigration rarely help corresponding sections of the local population" much more than such a blanket judgement. Overall, it is just not true that economics is zero sum. It doesn't have to be. An entire people can in fact flourish.
It's so hard to study; one of the key things you loose in an environment where you bring in bulk migrants is a cultural expectation to interact with juniors that are part of your community.
It's not just a supply and demand equation; it's a fundamentally different environment that changes the social payoff for mentoring, networking, and building a reputation.
Ultimately despite all the propaganda trying to convince us that diversity is inherently beneficial, we are trading economic benefits for social costs. So we need to carefully restrict migration to make sure the economic benefits are actually there.
The economic benefits are really not clear; at least not without caveats and clear conditions for the advanced skills that make a migrant beneficial.
This is if you believe that lower wages for high skill work is not an issue.
However high migration rates lower social trust, this is well studied.
If you take a smaller example, hiring internationally vs domestically. If you have to go domestic then you might have to settle for a less ideal qualification, requiring more training.
This is repeated everywhere, so companies that train better are more likely to succeed. Leading to conditions that encourage upskilling for locals overall.
>Perhaps if companies could not "just hire from overseas" or "just outsource" there would be a longer term growth strategy that would focus more on the education of the US population (not just training for this or that job).
Except the Heritage Foundation, er, I mean, Trump Administration controls all 3 branches of government and has all the freedom in the world to power a resuscitation of public education in America, except they're not interested in that at all; quite the opposite, they want to further fragment education baselines and make secondary education less desirable.
Yes of course. I was trying to remain tangential to the current administration and stay on the level of the underlying problem they seem to intuit related to this one, very specific policy decision (hard to tell with them, that's for sure). Most everything they do deserves condemnation, so there would be little to talk about otherwise.
I don't think you have to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the USA (or rather, it couldn't have been trained into USA workers), but that the talent wasn't trained in the USA so bringing in an outside worker is the only way to hire for the position.
You can't really expect a company hiring PhD's in a niche field to show that they couldn't have spent 7 years training an American for the work.
My former employer exclusively brought in that kind of talent.
But it was so hard to get the visas (and so much uncertainty in whether or not they'd be able to secure a visa for any particular worker) that they opened up a European and Canadian offices.
That's so funny. You realize there is already an O-1 visa, right? I hate to be a bearer of bad news but the vast, vast majority of H-1Bs are not PhD holders for which no suitable American PhD exists. If you go out into to the working world for awhile, you'll see that.
Immigrants make up 14% of the population but make up over 20% of entrepreneurs. 44% of fortune 500 company founders were either born outside US or to immigrant parents in the US.
Interesting. I think this gets at guywithhat’s sibling comment:
> you'd have to do a study to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the US, and that an increased supply of workers didn't drag down salaries, either short or long-term.
If the median H1B for software is exactly the same as the overall median, it makes you wonder if the median would be different if the H1B was not an option available to employers.
I saw this in my specialized science field too, in California a couple of decades ago. Real wages for that work have dropped 5 fold at least, partly due to automation, but I saw labs that were 100% immigrants, many H1Bs. Not complaining, just observing. were H1Bs necessary though? No. Many US born in that field found themselves jobless upon graduation. It was all about cheap labor
yup, anecdotally the majority of postdocs these days are internationals who are willing to work 60+ hour weeks on $50k a year, for the infinitesimal chance to land a R1 tenure-track faculty position. americans have no interest in getting a phd and then subjecting themselves to this kind of indentured servitude.
Whoa whoa whoa, that's (1) not correct[1], but (2) shameless goalpost motion in any case.
The whole premise of your original contention was that we should measure like-profession salaries to see whether or not there is an effect. Then when no effect was shown, you switched it up in favor of an argument that (again, incorrectly) predicts that such an effect can't be shown at all. That's not good faith discussion.
[1] Immigrant labor is arriving, by definition, in a pre-existing market. If immigrants can't be hired more cheaply than existing labor, by definition they can't be pulling wages down.
> Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.
So, it seems that if we remove H1b workers and assume that the demand would have stayed the same, then domestic salaries should have been higher. Assuming, of course, that companies won’t simply offshore.
The assumption that companies won't offshore is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Companies already do a lot of offshoring - you think any rational actor in this space that was hiring H1Bs isn't going to simply relocate them to more friendly jurisdictions for immigration?
On top of this, these are workers who would have otherwise paid tax in the US!
It feels as if you're insinuating that we shouldn't be taking measures to prevent offshoring and there's nothing to do but allow our labor markets to be subverted.
>you think any rational actor in this space that was hiring H1Bs isn't going to simply relocate them to more friendly jurisdictions for immigration?
This was true before and after today.
Put another way, if all the H-1B jobs really can be offshored quickly and easily the way so many Indians and anti-Trump people here and elsewhere confidently predict, *that would have happened already*.
I'd argue that it doesn't happen more because it's (relatively) easy to bring labor onshore.
But yes, if that path doesn't exist, I don't think that global companies are going to start hiring American, they're going to continue hiring globally but take the path of least resistance towards bringing this talent onboard.
Overall the US economy employs about 800,000 software engineers, with 200,000 or so of them being H1B holders.
Now you can argue you would prefer that those 200,000 jobs go to Americans, but on the scale of the overall economy, it really doesn’t matter. What’s far more important is the massive impact those 800,000 software engineers have on the rest of the economy. Four million IT jobs, the entire finance and healthcare and retail industries that are propped up on technology built by those people; whole technology companies like Uber or doordash that create entirely new labor markets.
Risk 25% of that capacity on the idea that we would rather have those industries built solely on domestically-grown engineering talent? Why would that be a good tradeoff?
It's ludicrous. US companies will not be able to dig up 200,000 qualified software engineers in the domestic population while every other skilled profession is experiencing a similar brain drain.
The prospect of a $100k/year/employee visa tax makes opening an office in Europe so much more compelling.
I guess the people who can't be offshored will see their salaries go up so that's cool?
"Computer science ranked seventh amongst undergraduate majors with the highest unemployment at 6.1 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."
Obviously there is not going to be a drop of 200k overnight, but I think the graduates of CS will be thankful there are more opportunities for them. These opportunities will drive more students to take CS classes in the US.
This reflects that there are just less openings overall. In a shrinking job market layoffs have already disproportionately gone to H1B holders; future layoffs, if this policy is implemented, will further erode H1B numbers, but it won’t magic up more domestic engineering job openings.
You know what would provide job growth in high tech? Economic growth and expanding prosperity in the economy overall.
I wonder what effect the US's heavy reliance on HB1 visas (and off-shoring more broadly) has had on the size of the cohorts graduating with CS degrees.
All I have is anecdotal conversations of people avoiding tech under the assumption that writing code would be off-shored.
Maybe? But what about training and talent pool? Imagine how many companies would not take off because there’s no one to implement the founder’s idea. Imagine you’re a startup and you have hiring difficulties because all the good ones are over at Oracle or Microsoft (doubting the existence of FAANG).
>> Imagine how many companies would not take off because there’s no one to implement the founder’s idea...
Why should we do imaginary stats with narrated conditions? America striven on startups well before H1B became expanded so much it's barely doesn't include janitor positions...
with smaller H1B pool, startups may need pay more. But also more compensation and demand in IT in US would make more people go to IT - smth-smth middle class, not poor class.
BTW, what's the stats on how many doctors and lawyers come to US on H1B?
The problem you will have selling this to this crowd is we have been in the meetings. We know that 'we're going to use a consulting team on this' means lower wages. We know that 'we going to outsource this' to a company full of H1Bs is being done... to lower costs.
Maybe at FAANGs what you say is true. But at every place I've been when H1Bs ended up added (normally via consultancy or outsourcing) it was always to cut costs. And the only costs we were cutting was staff.
If h1bs are statistically a lot more centered in higher income urban areas, while overall populations of a given profession are more evenly distributed across the country...
Then that $120,000 salary median can still represent a 50% undercut of similar Urban salaries for a profession.
I'm going to contend that that is the case. But I don't have time to chase down the statistics
K, but if these are experts that literally do not exist in the US, why are the salaries not higher than median? It wasn't meant to fill junior level positions.
This program was meant to allow talent that is not available in the US, so that gaps could be filled with experts from overseas.
The math of bringing an employee onsite on an H1B just to depress wages does not work unless it is below the 25th percentile of wages (which is $90k).
Once you are breaking the $100k mark and want to only save costs, you are better off opening a GCC in Eastern Europe, Israel, or India, which is what most companies started doing once remote work became normalized in the early 2020s.
All this did is make a free "Thousand Talents" program for India, especially in chemical, petroleum, biopharma, and biochemical engineering - industries where the delta between US and India salaries aren't significant but the talent gap in the US is real.
There are much smarter ways to crack down on H1B abuse by consultancies - this ain't it.
Edit: can't reply, but here's why this is dumb
Assuming I am in Dallas (a fairly prominent domestic IT services hub) and hiring an H1B employee.
In Dallas, a wage around $95k base is fairly standard based on JPMC, DXC, and C1's salaries in the area.
That $95k an employee is has an additional 18% in employer required taxes and withholdings. Add to that an additional 5-10% for retirement account and insurance plans. That $95k employee became around $115k-125k.
Once salaries start breaking into the 6 figure mark, that 23-35% in overhead starts adding up very fast. On top of that visa processing before this rule costed around $15-20k in additional legal fees on the employer's side.
If I'm at the point where I'm paying a low six figure salary, I'm better off opening an office in Warsaw or Praha or Hyderabad where I can safely pay $50k-60k in base to get top 10% talent while getting a $10k-20k per head tax credit over a 3-5 year period depending on the amount I invest building a GCC because my after tax cost at that point becomes $50-60k per employee. These credits tend to require a $1M investment, and with the proposed H1B fee, this made that kind of FDI much easier to justify than it was before.
At least with the current status quo, if I was hiring an ML Engineer at MS or an SRE at Google (a large number of whom are H1Bs as well), I could justify hiring within the US, but adding an additional $100K filing fee just gives me no incentive at all to expand headcount domestically.
You don't use the stick if you also don't have the carrot.
> You are not taking into account section 174, It takes you 15 years to depreciate foreign salary vs first year
That's a rounding error now that it costs $100K to renew or apply for an H1B visa. And for larger organizations breaking the mid-8 figures in revenue mark, section 174 changes never had an impact one way or the other - it was mostly local dev shops and MSPs that faced the brunt of the
section 174 onslaught.
> Honestly, even Germany is probably better bang-for-the-buck than Hyderabad
Germany needs to severely reduce employer contributions and taxes to become cost competitive against Warsaw, Praha, or Hyd for software and chip design jobs.
That said, this is a net positive for Germany's biotech, mechanical, biopharma, and other engineering industries that aren't software or chip design related.
This is a pet peeve of mine, but there is an english name for that city and it's Prague.
There is no point in using the local spelling because it adds no clarity, is less obvious to pronounce for any reader and the locals are not really gonna thank you for doing this either. Just seems like a form of light cultural white-knighting to me.
You are not even consistent because Warsaw is not how locals spell that.
It's a peeve of mine as well moreso when they don't carry it out for English placenames that get transliterated into a local language but some of these folks will carry the localized version -like they won't insist on "New York" instead of Nova Iorque in PR or BR. But even above, they are inconsistent with Warsaw carrying the English spelling.
The most prominent exonyms are of cities like Paris, London, Moscow or Beijing.
I.e., places culturally and historically significant enough that older historical pronunciations have become ossified in foreign languages.
English having a "Prague" spelling means the name of the city was important enough to have entered the English language back in the day when English was still borrowing heavily from French.
Um. Beijing's not the exonym. Like, maybe this reveals that I'm ancient at this point, but I remember it being Peking at least the first few years of school.
I don't know much about the other cities you mentioned, but there's no way you could get top developers from Warsaw for $50-60k in 2025. You may be hard pressed to find them even if you 2x that. As a point of reference, a nice family apartment costs around $1M here now. Times they are a-changin.
> you could get top developers from Warsaw for $50-60k in 2025
We'd be paying that for Early career base (think L3). Mid-career you'd see people breaking the $80-110k base range.
I don't like giving "TC" simply because RSUs are very dependent on a number of outside variables.
And my example was for why a JPMC opens an offshore office abroad, or why a company hires an EPAM type.
For product companies who actually care about work quality, you won't too see much difference between salary abroad and a US salary from 10 years ago. I'd recommend using a fork of the old GitLab comp calculator - it's fairly accurate.
you're pointing out facts - yet people deny. most software jobs listings are either in eastern europe or india these days. that's the "A.I" eating software jobs.
yeah some companies might list U.S jobs - but they're only seriously hiring for Staff roles. the rest offshored.
Offering a perspective from Berlin - a decent-to-good senior engineer goes for $120k-$130k so I'm guessing for Warsaw, you could get someone similar for $90k-100k
Of course it all depends on who are we actually talking about. I think talented seniors with 5-10yoe and proper communication skills expect North of $150k.
> Interesting, there are plenty of localities in the US that hire 5-10yoe developers at south of $100k.
I don't doubt there may be people who would be fine with that, but I guess no one who values their own skills would go for it if there are plenty of East/West Coast companies hiring remotely.
> Is there a good resource for data on wages in Poland? I mean, I am going to look, but I thought I'd ask.
I think you can start from looking at the local job offers, e.g. https://justjoin.it. Just remember there are a couple of nuances:
- most developers in Poland don't want to be FTEs, because the tax burden on that type of employment is at least 2 times higher than on B2B contracts; effectively, we ended up having a market where everyone is hired B2B, but with all the usual FT benefits (paid vacations and sick days, equipment, private insurance, gym memberships, free food and whatnot) - it's sort of a gray area, but the related law is not really enforced; thus as a foreign company you compete with the local B2B rates + benefits
- people are aware that US is a different market generating more revenue
- the work-life balance may be quite different, so they expect to be paid accordingly
- Warsaw is generally more expensive than other cities in Poland, so you don't need to limit yourself to one city in your search, the same way as you wouldn't hire remote developers from the Bay Area only
- there's a reason these offers are hanging in there :)
> Warsaw is generally more expensive than other cities in Poland, so you don't need to limit yourself to one city in your search
Yep! Krakow, Lodz, and the other various cities have become cost effective and built hiring pipelines as well.
You see this all over the CEE and India as well, such as Czechia (Brno, Ostrava), Romania (Cluj thanks to the Transylvanian government, Timisoara) and India (BLR/Pune/Hyd/Gurgaon to Tier 2/3 cities)
I guess all those management meetings where we brought on teams staffed by H1Bs in order to cut costs, when our only costs were wages, didn't make sense.
Funny things is the agencies/consultancies/outsource companies all solds us on it would cut costs when the only thing changed was labor. But apparently they could cut costs without cutting labor costs? How does that work?
While the permanent residence process is clearly broken for people from India and China, I don't think it's accurate to characterise H1B workers as indentured servants. The paperwork for changing jobs on an H1B is fairly easy and is not subject to the H1B lottery.
Cap-exempt H1B holders working for universities are restricted to switching only to other cap-exempt employers, but even then I never felt I had to work 60+ hours a week.
I am specifically talking about tech, I personally knew many H1B folks that worked insane hours literally so that they were seen as ultra productive and wouldn't get cut.
Another job willing to do the paperwork, willing to sponsor, that has access to an immigration lawyer. It's not just 'finding a job' it's finding a job at a company willing/able to do all that. It's definitely a much higher bar.
The paperwork is far less onerous than for sponsoring a new immigrant.
In my experience recruiters saw H1B transfers as routine but would ghost me once I explained that I required a new visa sponsorship since I worked or a cap-exempt employer and could not simply transfer.
While temporary residents do have fewer rights than permanent residents or citizens, the characterisation of us as indentured servants is just absurd. Those of us working in tech are pretty privileged overall - the median software developer salary is above the 90th percentile!
That you are "pretty privileged" is a value judgment of your own and is irrelevant to the deleterious effects that the conditions of your employment create on the industry at large.
Yes: software developer incomes are high. But simultaneously, unemployment amongst CS grads at American universities is also high.
Shrug. Having 10 years of experience when I moved here I don’t think I was competing with recent CS grads at any point. I did however share that experience with the newly graduated US junior developers I mentored.
It is the distribution that matters at a wage level cluster defined by DOL. There are four (i.e. entry, qualified, experienced, and fully competent) and those are higher than the medians.
Your second paragraph doesn't follow the first. 90-118K might feel like a lot to you, or to many, but it doesn't mean that those wages aren't dragged DOWN. If you live in SF, NYC, Seattle or other HCOL areas, 90-118K is definitely not HIGH. And software jobs pay WAY more than that. H1's definitely are paid BELOW the prevailing wage for the same job, in the same area. So compare apples to apples.
The H1B salary requirements are based on prevailing wages for the job location. So for Software developers in San Francisco, based on the experience level of the job that will be:
Level 1 Wage:$65.24 / Hour - $135,699 / Year
Level 2 Wage:$77.71 / Hour - $161,637 / Year
Level 3 Wage:$90.18 / Hour - $187,574 / Year
Level 4 Wage:$102.65 / Hour - $213,512 / Year
(Compared to the all levels $175k occupational median vs the $74k all occupation median.)
> Any suggestion that the program is dragging wages down instead of dragging wages up is not just misleading but factually wrong.
The stats you provide here don't support your claim.
H1B visa holders can be paid more on average while still having a downward effect on wages...
Imagine that some car model costs $200,000 to buy in the US. However, an entrepreneur realises they can can import the same car from a poorer country for just $100,000 then sell it in the US for less than the manufacturer themselves. The manufacturer finds out about this and says, "hey! you're selling my car for less", but the importer says, "no, actually, you'll find the median car in the US is $50,000 so I'm technically increasing car prices".
So what you're saying could be wrong in two ways... One you could be wrong in the sense that even if it does increase median wages, that doesn't mean it necessary increases the median wage of US citizens if now a significant percentage the best employment opportunities are going to H1B visa holders instead of citizens.
But secondly, and the point I was trying to make with the car analogy, is that you could be wrong about the average wages going up too if H1B visa holders are taking jobs which would pay even more were it not for HB1 visas. So if the average wage of a SWE in the US is say $150k, but the average H1B visa holder is being paid $120k, H1Bs are clearly not "dragging wages up".
And realistically it's far more likely H1B visa holders suppress wages given how relatively high US wages are.
I'll end this comment by saying that personally I think this idea that giving the best opportunities to immigrants is probably directly wrong for many reasons. Of course, allowing in businesses and individuals who will create jobs makes a lot of sense, but what you really want is the best opportunities going to your own citizens, then to bring in cheap labour to fill the crappy jobs citizens don't really want to do, but are now increasingly doing when they leave university like working in a bar or becoming a barista. If there's a great job a company can't fill with the domestic workforce perhaps they should train someone for that role or take a risk on a recent graduate like in the old days?
OP's comment still makes no sense then. H1bs are not hollowing out "middle class" wage earners then - the most you could say is that they are slightly reducing income of high-income earners.
But also, the H1b median salary for a software engineer is ~$120k, which is almost identical to that of the US median overall - so all of this hullabaloo seems pretty groundless.
<< the most you could say is that they are slightly reducing income of high-income earners
First, I would like you to reconsider 'high income' and putting $120k in that category. It was a good chunk of change. In this year of our lord 2025, it is not. It is, for my region anyway, barely acceptable middle class income.
The median income in San Francisco is $69k. In New York City, it's $41k. Median household incomes are ~2x those numbers.
A $120k job in any region of the country is 'high income'. You are feeling a different effect, which is that we have designed our country such that even high income people often do not feel economically secure.
Stop. Just because that is the median income does not automatically make it high. The value of the income comes from what it is able to purchase. That value has been steadily eroded over the year. If anything, it is indictment of the existing system. If anything, the proper way of looking at it is that the actual value you are able to get for your work has been greatly reduced. The number is meaningless to anyone, who is able to look at basic reality ( or does not depend on status quo for one reason or another ).
The sheer balls on people to suggest that high absolute value automatically means it is high. And that is before we get to how those jobs are are not even in the same category...
I am going to stop here, because I don't want to get mean.
If you barely consider yourself middle-class with an income 50% over the median then you are probably at least living in a "high income" region :P
And your self-classification is questionable, but that is very common. Maybe a good trigger to experience gratefulness and satisfaction for the economical situation you are in?
IMHO The ability to choose to live in a high income region (or more specifically a cosmopolitan city) is one of the core characteristics of what it means to be middle class.
Partially, that's because increased self determination is part of being middle class. Partionally, that's because the ability to participate in culture (art, music, education, multiculturalism, etc.) is part of being middle class; and those opportunities are highly concentrated in the cities.
I think you misunderstand me greatly and, more importantly, greatly misunderstand the zeitgeist. I am unbelievably thankful for being paid for what I am doing the amount I am paid.
But, and this is the most important part, just because I am in better situation than most, does not make the overall state of the population that much less shitty.
I deleted longer response from yesterday. Long story short, I disagree. If anything, it is unrealistic for anyone to expect that current economic ecosystem is sustainable.
I don't expect a lot, but I do expect my standard to improve over that of my parents', not decrease.
Pretty much. All this did is now create a thousand talents program for India.
H1B visa abuse by consultancies and mass recruiters is a real issue, but this now incentivized companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Pfizer, Cheveron etc to expand their Indian offices.
Edit: can't reply
> Was there any reason for them not to? It's cheaper than H1B anyways.
Spending an additional $10-15k in visa filing fees isn't that big of a deal for an employer who's already paying around 25-35% in withholding and benefits, but at $100K that makes it enough that if you needed to sponsor 10 people on an H1B, you now hit the monetary amount to avail GCC tax rebates and subsidies in most of Eastern Europe and India, where they will give you an additional $10-20k in tax credits and subsidies per head.
Basically, opening a new office abroad just to save on $10-15k of filing fees per employees wasn't worth it, but now that it'll be $100k per employee, the math just shifted.
> Why is this parasitic organization allowed to incorporate?
VC now, not a director anymore. But help me find a new grad with 3-4 years of exploit development and OS internals experience in the US. I can't.
On the other hand, I can in Tel Aviv. There's a reason the entire cybersecurity industry has shifted outside the US.
Large sectors of the US tech scene just lack ANY domestic know-how.
OK. But I'm not fighting against them for jobs here. I'm not fighting against H1Bs who are willing to put up with different shared housing situations than I am for housing here.
So you’re going to hire foreigners in the US or you’re going to ship the whole operation overseas. Why is this parasitic organization allowed to incorporate?
Guest workers have no long term stake in living in the US unless they win a green card. Six years and they're out. Given this state of affairs, they will be compliant and not demand increasing compensation when they don't have to plan for a future in the US. Get too uppity and you get the boot. The suppression is hidden within this dynamic and sinks the prevailing wage for all workers.
A better perspective is that the median H1B holder created $100k+ worth of value for some US company. Salaries are lower than the value you create, or else your employer would stop paying you.
There could be some rare edge case where you are undercut by a direct competitor, but overall America is much richer with H1Bs that without them.
Value for who? Certainly not the majority of Americans. Depressed wages increase profits, which go to shareholders. Most Americans do not benefit from the H-1B grift. I’ll even argue it hurts US citizens by importing immigrants who aren’t necessary from a labor supply perspective (for those on the visa who are not exceptional talent), who compete for housing with citizens when there is a shortage of millions of housing units.
A few select tech and financial services companies, and their shareholders, benefit the most from the program.
I hire a programmer to code my app, SuperConnect++. I charge $0.99 to download the app. People buy the app if it's worth more than $0.99 to them.
If 150,000 people buy the app, then I have ~$150,000 of revenue. I can pay a programmer $100,000 a year and have $50,000 left over. 150,000 people benefited from the app.
Now say I have to pay an additional $100,000 visa fee for my programmer. My cost of $200,000 is less than my revenue of $150,000. I don't build the app. I don't get $50,000. 150,000 people who would have bought the app don't benefit from it. The biggest loss is to the Americans who don't get to buy the app.
There are other possibilities, maybe I increase the price to $1.99 or I hire an American. We can see that those are both bad. The former extracts $150,000 extra dollars from American consumers. Since unemployment is low for Americans and an American programmer can't have two jobs at once, the later just means that some other project that the American programmer would have worked on is not completed.
Unemployment for tech workers is not currently low, and it is taking months, or even years to find a new role, therefore this argument doesn’t hold water. Wages > consumer excess and profits. The world will go on if you don’t build the app, and perhaps someone else will. The evidence is clear this visa is abused at scale, and this action has been overdue.
Over 650k tech layoffs have occurred in the last 4 years. Companies have tried as hard as they can to offshore and use visa labor to avoid hiring US citizen workers. This doesn’t account for new job creation needed for workers entering the workforce. Corporations are also hiding jobs from US citizens (citations which you can find in my other recent comments).
To make this concrete, suppose that Elon Musk never immigrated to the US. SpaceX and Tesla are never founded, or are founded in some other country.
The American electric car market is never kickstarted, none of the American employees of SpaceX or Tesla are hired, there is no space renaissance.
Keeping out Elon Musk is somewhat good for United Launch Alliance and for Ford, but it's worse for all the Americans who have to buy worse cars and pay more for satellite internet.
To make this concrete, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla Motors. Musk later invested and, most certainly, made it vastly more successful than the two founders were on track to do, but Tesla Motors was already founded without requiring Musk's immigration to the US.
> suppose that Elon Musk never immigrated to the US
That’s certainly one version of how events may have been different - a sort of “It’s a Wonderful Life” scenario. (Though comparing Elon Musk to the kind and ethical George Bailey would be quite a stretch!) But it’s not inconceivable that other possibilities would have emerged.
It can be both. Median price of a home is $400k. Homebuyers need household income of ~$117k to afford typical home in U.S. Their income from ther visa enables their buying power to compete against citizens. About 300k H-1B visa holders own homes in the US per FWD.US. Other comments in this thread speak to the wage suppression and lower wages.
There is shortage of everything now. Maybe immigrants needing gas is raising gas prices too. (OK, i know you didn't say that, but its a joke :P) We could go back and forth posting links that contradict each other, or recognize that scapegoating immigrants isn't productive.
"The shortage of housing can be attributed to a range of regulatory and policy failures. These include burdensome permitting processes, outdated zoning regulations that dictate everything from lot sizes to parking requirements, complex legal frameworks, price controls, and restrictive financial regulations."
We would have to look at that by industry. For example, if median developer pay is $130k, then both of your numbers are below that and would bring the median down. $118k for highly skilled workers (purpose of H1B) seems low to me. Additionally, the upper bound for the middle class in all 50 states is above $100k.
The H-1B also includes professions like teacher and medical technician where the average wage is closer to $60k / year. Doing a broad "all professions" for H-1B misses out on the various areas where they work and appears to assume that they are all professions that regularly pay in the 90th percentile of American overall wages.
I've seen other analysis showing the 80% of the wages are below the prevailing wage of the equivalent role. It's definitely about wage suppression and having an indentured servant.
Are you really not familiar with management and corporations? Firstly, stating those numbers does not prove your point but it is all belied by exactly the reason all of us that are aware of the realities know, which is that for the most part part H-1Bs are sought after because of them being cheaper. The implications from those like Gates, that the average person in the U.S. on an H-1B is a Turing or Wozniak or whatever is laughable, This is not to denigrate them but the so-called "genius visa" is a farce and the notion that there are not Americans that can do the jobs is also quite ridiculous. These things are heavily gamed and people from the countries that produce the majority of such applicants know that. I think you if you analyze it further, you may find it is all a lot more cynical than you might suspect. Why do you think H-1B visa holders in tech primarily come from a small set of countries that are not centers of tech innovation? Is it really that Europeans can't figure out bubble-sort?
your link says that those numbers are after some time spent in US, and initial payment is 75k for 25p and 94k for 50p.
Also, those numbers are bumped up by bigtech who doesn't discriminate by visa, so pays in bodyshops are even lower and tech salaries are way higher than that in US.
Haven't you heard how cheating that works? This is what was filled in on the H1B applications. The government doesn't check that, and so companies don't pay.
Second, Indians have to pay their bosses to get a job. Their real pay is at least $20k lower. And there's far worse as well.
Looking at it solely from a perspective of competition between labor glosses over the fact that insufficient labor is also bad for the economy because it keeps companies from growing and hiring more people.
So sure, while the fewer jobs that they can fill could have higher wages (not a given, because lack of labor can stunt or kill companies) there could be much fewer people employed overall, which is clearly bad overall.
Of course, that assumes there is enough room for companies to grow. There are strong indications (e.g. the various labor and unemployment surveys) that this is the case in the US. In fact, there is a credible theory that the reason the US managed the inflation crisis so well was due to the immigration crisis.
> People need to understand that most reformists don't want to get rid of the truly exceptional immigration to the US.
And how are “they” planning on determining who is “truly exceptional”? And what makes you think the “truly exceptional” ones are still going to have any interest in coming here when they see what happens to the people who the current regime deems “not exceptional”?
I sure as hell wouldn’t come to the US knowing I may be deported to a third world prison if I post the wrong thing online.
I don't think you need to define 'truly exceptional.' You just need to put in a limit and the scarcity will force the slots to go to the best and rarest talent. I'm all for bringing the truly best and brightest to the US. I'm not for replacing large swaths of the domestic labor force with an imported lower price equivalent.
> And how are “they” planning on determining who is “truly exceptional”?
For example by implementing a $100 000 fee for their H-1B visas, which ensures that companies will only use those visas to contract truly exceptional talent. That's a very small price to pay for a company to be able to hire a person who is among the greatest in the world in her field.
I don't think there's an H1B category for online political edgelords anyway -- we have enough of those already on both sides of the political spectrum, so I don't think anyone cares if that type of person is afraid to come here. If anything, maybe it's better to have less of that kind of thing so we can focus on getting things done instead of political partisanship?
Exceptional migrants can still qualify under O-1, which hasn’t really changed at all. Most tech startup founders can qualify for O-1, unless your startup is really pointless.
> In the last few decades, there has been growth of abuse of the program to get mid level talent at below market rates which really hurts the middle class in America.
That's a weird definition for "middle class", there are only 65k H1b visas issued every year. If you really are talking about the middle 60% or whatever of all workers, immigrants on H1b's are irrelevant noise. At most, these visas might be seen to impact specific professions (tech in particular, lots of doctors too) that most people don't consider representative of the "middle class".
The hollowed out middle class is surely because of the class of jobs that have been growing the fastest, seeing the highest salaries and salary growths, and have been the best jobs in America for 2 decades.
It’s not because of the other jobs which the H1Bs aren’t even allowed to do abd have seen falling salaries and degrowth.
Are we saying software engineers making $125-150k are middle class? If so, then yes this I absolutely believe this is true. These will still be high level people for the most part that will up our game in my opinion. Thats in the opinion column, hard to prove. But this fee may have a net negative impact on jobs for Americans as it will push more companies to simply outsource to these countries rather than pay more in the US. So you need to tax that too. And then they will find some way around that and we will need to tax that new thing. I don’t like this game, it is trying to stop progress in my opinion. But I guess it is a balancing act and who knows where you set the line. Adding friction to it will definitely make it so only higher quality talent migrates here, that much seems clear.
I would think healthily so, even if on the upper bands [0]. I personally see "middle class" solidly as $50k-150k household income (2 adults 1 kid)... but I live in the South. Two decades ago I lived in the bay area for less than $100k (electrician)... and that was regionally closer to the lower end of "middle class," even out in Hayward.
Agreed, however the top end usually comes to US to do masters and then tries to get job using H1B. If this is where to be instated in this form, it almost precludes any fresh college graduates from getting a shot at this.
The big tech companies have the financial means to invest in anything. They are essentially printing money.
However, which startup can afford an additional cost of 100,000 dollars for a fresh PhD graduate who is essential for their niche?
The true economic benefit of the H1B visa program for the US economy lies in the long tail of smaller firms that require a limited number of specialized personnel, which, by definition, is scarce.
A PhD comes as a student with F1 student visa that expires the day of their graduation.
O1 is unlikely to be granted to a student who has not graduated yet. What are they going to show for evidence? Manuscripts in preparation? Or class grades?
I guess they wouldn't have much to show for evidence. Which is exactly why they would be correctly classified as not being a specialist, and therefore undeserving on an O-1 visa.
These visas are not meant to allow company to hire underpaid employees that quite literally just graduated.
A company conducts a technical interview to assess a candidate. Their public record is not their only criterion of hiring. USCIS relies exclusively on public record (and maybe recommendation letters)
People need to understand that most reformists don't want to get rid of the truly exceptional immigration to the US.
What do the most influential reformists want? The ones who set the extreme agenda that everyone else follows? As I understand it, right now the US is routinely enacting policies that the majority of citizens do not want; from this, could we surmise that the majority of people, and presumably thus the majority of reformists, will receive the extreme H1B policies that they don't want?
How valid is this premise in an increasingly global world?
Most of the companies that are paying salaries could (and already do!) have offices in other jurisdictions where they could hire the same talent.
Better to bring this talent onshore, where the wages are taxed, than force these companies to hire from satellite offices?
It doesn't make much financial sense for companies to stop sourcing talent globally just because they can't be brought onshore, especially given enough time.
Purely anecdotal, but for me personally this wouldn't change who or how I hire, just the location.
This seems virtually impossible to enforce. It's trivial to restructure hiring a developer to write software, as licensing software from a foreign development firm, or any number of other workarounds.
This is not just a hypothetical, this is something that already happens when companies are looking to optimize their tax burden. Corporate structuring and income shifting are big businesses in their own right and serve to find the minimum amount of changes required to be able to legally reclassify income.
In the case of this bill specifically, in the unlikely even it passes, a simple corporate inversion will solve this problem. Instead of the US company owning foreign subsidiaries, the structure is inverted: the parent company becomes foreign, which will own a domestic US corporation. When the multinational wants to hire or retain offshore talent, it simply pays out from the parent company. Again these aren't hypotheticals, these are real tax avoidance strategies that are already in place and are well-trodden paths.
You can come up with an infinite amount of regulation to try to halt this (this problem is also called tax base erosion) but it ends up doing more harm than good - eventually you end up with a tax code and regulatory environment so complex that that alone disincentivizes new investment.
The goal is not just to retain existing capital and talent by forcing them to be locked in - it's to compete for the next dollar, the next startup, the next factory - new investment will follow the path of least resistance, while older companies eventually close up shop due to one reason or another.
If your worldview is one of "We already have the best capital and talent, so we don't need to bother to compete to acquire new capital and talent", the world you live in will stagnate and wither with respect to societies that will bend over backwards for this.
corporate charters should be treated as the tools they are. such businesses do not exist without being tied to a particular set of laws in a particular jurisdiction.
I suspect that in the case of tech companies, the end result of this won't be more jobs going to Americans, it will be either remote workers in low wage countries or outsourcing to low wage countries. Which, in the long term, might lead to fewer tech jobs in the US overall.
Still, I can't help but feel a little bit of glee at all the tech companies who did their best to suck up to Trump, and now he stabs them in the back.
I imagine for the "best of the best" making $500k+ annually, this is just the cost of business and they're not going anywhere, while for the h1b workers making closer to $100k annually, this is a show stopper.
Agree with the abuse part. Question is - is this the right way to fix the problem? A half baked executive order that raises more questions than answers for the existing H1B visa holders.
With that in mind, would you say the administration is going about this the right way? Because this is going to hurt all H1B candidates, not just the "middle".
First it was "we're only against illegal immigration, we want people to do it the right way".
Now it's "we need to limit the volume" and "don't want to get rid of the truly exceptional immigration".
Forgive me if I am skeptical, especially in a world where ICE is rounding up classic "exceptional" immigrants like biology researchers, or South Korean experts setting up a factory.
Honestly: a lie. One you chose because it appealed to you, and then constructed a narrative to support it. We could easily afford to have a middle class in this country if we distributed wealth differently, and more immigrants would help us do it.
I think one unintended outcome of this would be that the jobs would be completely outsourced to outside of US. The ones remaining would be government contracts that have provisions against it. The government could add tariffs on services, but we need to see if that just moves the companies outside of US or not. Capitalism in a democracy is hard to control.
